


Running With Our Eyes Closed

by unwhithered



Category: The Vampire Diaries & Related Fandoms, The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Families of Choice, Fix-It of Sorts, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Post-Season 2, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Road Trips, Season 3 AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 11:22:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29367717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unwhithered/pseuds/unwhithered
Summary: “You’re not going to die, Elena,” Ric promises, but it rings hollow. She’s right. Everybody who knows this cursed little town’s secrets turns up dead sooner or later, and Elena knows more secrets than most. Jeremy too. “Klaus thinks you’re dead, and Damon will die before he lets anything happen to you.” He pauses for a moment, squeezes her thin shoulder. “I’ll die before I let anything happen to you.”“But I don’t want you to die.” She slams her coffee cup down on the counter hard enough that hairline cracks run up the side and liquid sloshes over the edge. “I don’t want anyone else to die. Not you or Damon or Jeremy or...or anyone. And I don’t want to tiptoe around the ghosts of everyone who already has. Not anymore. As long as I stay here I’ll be looking over my shoulder waiting for the next thing that’s going to try to kill us.”OrAU beginning in S3E01. Elena has a little more sense and a little less of a death wish. So they get the hell out of town, and they try to start over.
Relationships: Caroline Forbes & Elena Gilbert, Elena Gilbert & Damon Salvatore, Elena Gilbert & Jeremy Gilbert, Elena Gilbert & Jeremy Gilbert & Alaric Saltzman, Jeremy Gilbert & Jenna Sommers
Comments: 5
Kudos: 16





	1. swallowing my pride 'til i nearly choke

Elena stares blankly out the window all the way home from Tennessee. Ric keeps glancing at her in the rear view mirror - nearly every five minutes, at one point - like he’s waiting for her to break. He probably is. She probably should. Should cry, scream, do any of the things an eighteen year old girl faced with a pair of bodies mutilated by her ex-boyfriend ought to. 

Instead she takes Damon’s hand when he throws it over the back of the bench seat and wiggles his fingers at her, strokes her thumb over his familiar ring. So much like Stefan’s. Stefan, who…well, it turns out she was dating the bad brother all along.

“It was really him?” she asks softly, sometime after they cross the state line.

“It was really him,” Damon confirms, just as softly. Squeezes her hand with carefully moderated strength.

“Okay.” She sighs. Swallows past the lump in her throat. Considers rolling down the window and screaming until her lungs give out. “Okay.”

\------

“Stefan’s really gone,” she tells Caroline, not looking away from the map full of pins and newspaper cuttings. Because of course Damon Salvatore still reads honest-to-God paper newspapers. It’s the little things that remind her how  _ old _ the Salvatores actually are - the crystal decanters of whiskey and wine in nearly every room, the paper news clippings, the books with cracked spines she used to pull off of shelves, their margins filled up with faded notes in two familiar sets of handwriting. She thinks about these things because if she thinks about how many of the sticky notes on the map say  _ Stefan _ she might be ill. 

“It’s only been two months,” Caroline argues, but her heart isn’t in it. Her heels click loudly, deliberately, on the wooden floor as she crosses to stand beside Elena and study the map. Its contents clearly don’t surprise her. “We could still catch up to him. He could still come back.”

“Stop treating me like I’m fragile, Caroline. I’m not fragile.” The subtle shivers running up and down her spine despite the summer heat say otherwise, but she can always blame it on the alcohol. She takes another swig straight from the bottle of gin and reaches out to brush her fingertips over the article about the murders in Tennessee. “I saw the bodies he’s leaving behind. He’s gone and he’s not coming back, not as the Stefan we know. And I...I’ve got enough ghosts haunting me already. I can’t spend my life hanging onto another one.”

“Yeah.” Caroline laughs sadly as she takes the bottle from Elena’s hands and chugs what must be a quarter of it in one go. Elena doesn’t envy the vampires their alcohol tolerance - must make it nearly impossible to drink until you forget your problems, and she’s been doing that a lot lately. “I had this whole speech, you know, I’ve been working on it all summer. About how you need to move on eventually. Let Damon spend his eternity looking for Stefan because you still have a life to live. I’m a little disappointed I put all that work in and I don’t even need to use it.”

Elena snorts, ugly and unladylike. “I might still need it. Later.”

“Later then,” Caroline agrees. 

\-----

Ric leaves. It hurts more than she expected it to - and she did expect it, because if Elena has learned one thing this past year, it’s that everybody leaves. 

Her phone rings. She doesn’t answer it. 

She wakes up screaming at four am, makes coffee at five when Jeremy’s own nightmares chase him out of bed, and drives across town to Ric’s loft as dawn breaks over the horizon. It’s so early her hangover hasn’t even kicked in yet. Honestly, she might still be a little drunk. There aren’t enough people on the roads this early to make that dangerous. The quiet streets and occasional smiling jogger make Mystic Falls look exactly like what she thought it was, just a year ago - a sleepy little town in a sleepy little corner of the South. A place where nothing more dramatic than a cat fight at the Miss Mystic Falls competition ever happens.

Elena doesn’t miss living in blissful ignorance about the creatures lurking in their midst, precisely. She does miss a time when she didn’t see the afterimage of blood and death overlayed on every street corner.

\-----

“Go away, Damon,” Alaric shouts at the door. He buries his face in a pillow that smells musty, just like everything else in his apartment after months of barely being used, and tries to ignore the knocking for thirty more seconds. Can’t he have just one day to wallow in his own shame and misery before the supernatural comes crashing through his door again?

Except it’s not the supernatural. It’s just Elena, looking young and small in only her pajamas and a flannel shirt he must have missed while packing last night. She hasn’t even put on her daily armor of makeup yet. She smiles weakly up at him, murmurs a soft “hi” while he scrambles to button up his pants.

Christ, she really is only 18. Last night 18 had seemed old enough to do everything by herself, but in the morning light he can see all the ways that she’s still a child. Guilt churns in his stomach - or maybe that’s just the hangover. “You’re, uh...not who I expected. Did you miss the part where I checked out of all this?”

Still, he leaves the door open as he turns away to search for a shirt. The one he wore last night comes to hand, though his fingers are still too sleep-clumsy to do up the buttons. Coffee first, then more clothing. Elena has seen him covered in his own blood and guts, she’ll survive the sight of his bare chest for a few more minutes until he convinces her to leave (just another reason he’s a horrible role model, probably). 

“I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t know who else to go to.” The door swings shut and she scuffs her feet awkwardly in the entryway. 

Without even looking he knows exactly how she must be standing - shoulders hunched, arms wrapped around herself beneath the oversized flannel. He sighs and pulls two mugs from the cabinet instead of one, checks to make sure they aren’t dusty before pouring too much sugar into the bottom of one because Elena’s coffee order is one of the things that still marks her as a  _ child _ . Elena takes the silent invitation for what it is and comes to lean on the counter beside him while he goes through the motions of making enough toast for two, leaving her to butter it while he pours the coffee. She’s polite enough to let him drain his first mug and pour a second before speaking again.

“Stefan is gone,” she finally says, staring into her coffee cup. It trembles a little in her hand. “Those bodies in Tennessee...that’s not the man I love. That man scares the hell out of me, Ric.”

“Good,” Ric grunts. Maybe she’s finally grown some common sense. “He should.”

“Hoping we could get him back was the only thing keeping me around.”

“Elena…” Ric puts down his mug and reaches for her, his brow furrowed in concern. He’d known it was bad. Hell, between him and Elena and Jeremy, someone in the Gilbert house had woken up screaming every night of the week all summer. But he never thought…

“No, no,” she shakes her head quickly, covers his hand on her shoulder with her own smaller one. “Not like that. I just meant...he was the only reason to stay here, in town. Because everyone who stays in this town seems to die.”

“You’re not going to die, Elena,” he promises, but it rings hollow. She’s right. Everybody who knows this cursed little town’s secrets turns up dead sooner or later, and Elena knows more secrets than most. Jeremy too. “Klaus thinks you’re dead, and Damon will die before he lets anything happen to you.” He pauses for a moment, squeezes her thin shoulder. “I’ll die before I let anything happen to you.”

“But I don’t want you to die.” She slams her coffee cup down on the counter hard enough that hairline cracks run up the side and liquid sloshes over the edge. “I don’t want anyone else to die. Not you or Damon or Jeremy or...or anyone. And I don’t want to tiptoe around the ghosts of everyone who already has. Not anymore. As long as I stay here I’ll be looking over my shoulder waiting for the next thing that’s going to try to kill us.”

“Yeah. Yeah, me too.”

“So let’s leave.”

“What?” Ric takes a step back, blinks at her like that’s going to help him decide if he heard her correctly.

“Let’s leave. Let’s pack up Jeremy and drive until we find somewhere nothing like Mystic Falls, and start over.”

“Elena, I told you. I’m not a good role model. I can’t take care of you here, I certainly can’t take care of you anywhere else.”

“You’re better at it than you think,” she argues, taking a step closer. He steps back again, but the kitchen is small - she corners him up against the counter and keeps him there with a hard, haunted stare. She doesn’t look young anymore.

“Oh, Christ,” he groans, looking up at the ceiling so he doesn’t have to see the grief and exhaustion in her eyes. “Are you a sucker for a lost cause or what?”

“You’re not a lost cause, Ric. You’re just lost. But so is Jeremy, and so am I. Our family is  _ gone _ . We don’t have anybody.” She grabs his hand where he’s white-knuckling the counter, forces him to ease his grip and let her tangle their fingers together, squeeze his hand. “I’m sorry, but you don’t have anybody either, so...we’re kind of good for each other.”

Ric laughs hoarsely, but he squeezes her hand in return. “I guess we are.” God, he’s too hungover for this shit. It actually sounds like she’s making sense. “You really want to leave, huh?”

“I really want to leave. But I don’t want to go without you.”

“Ugh.” Ric scrubs his free hand over his face, missing the familiar weight of the ring on his finger. “Flip a coin for who has to tell Damon?”

\-----

They tell Damon together - Elena and Alaric and Jeremy, all standing awkwardly on one side of the dining table in the Gilbert house, Damon watching them distrustfully from the other side. There are already cardboard boxes leaning up against the wall waiting to be filled. (“So we can’t back out,” Elena had said when she came home with them this morning.) The glass in Damon’s hand shatters, but he smiles as he picks shards out of his palm and fingers.

“That might be the first smart choice you’ve made all summer,” he says, and it doesn’t even sound fake - just the usual level of condescending. “What do you need?”

“What?” Elena asks, cocking her head like a confused puppy. Ric knows she had been expecting an argument. Everything with Damon is an argument.

“What do you need from me?” he repeats, pinning her with a stare. “Money? Got plenty of that. Somewhere to stay? I own a few houses, but Stefan knows about those. New ID? Know a guy in New York who can set you up with a whole new life, though he usually only does it for vampires.”

“You’re...really okay with this?”

“Of course I’m not okay with this, Elena!” Damon slams his hands down on the table, gripping the edge so hard it creaks ominously. Jeremy takes an involuntary half-step back and Ric slides subtly forward to put himself between the boy and the vampire “But I want you to live. And you’re right, chances are you won’t survive another year in this town, let alone your whole life. So if you want to leave, what do you need from me?”

“New identities would be a good start,” Ric answers while Elena is still staring, mouth slightly open.

“Done. But it’s going to take a week or two.”

“That’s fine,” Ric says. “We don’t even know where we’re going yet. And Elena still has to sell the house.”

“You can’t sell the house.”

“What, you think if we keep the house it means we’ll come back someday, like you and the Salvatore boarding house?” Elena huffs, tossing her hair over one shoulder in preparation for an argument. “We need the money, Damon.”

“No,  _ Elena _ ,” Damon drags out her name and rolls his eyes. It could be any other stupid argument they’ve had over the last year if there weren’t cracks spreading around his hands on the dining table. Ric takes another half step forward and sees the exact moment when Damon realizes Ric is putting himself between him and Elena. His eyes widen just a fraction, hurt and surprised, before he releases the table and takes a step back with his hands raised almost helplessly. There are new fissures running through the old wood. 

“You don’t need the money,” he says more softly, gaze flickering from Elena to Ric and back again. “I just told you I’ll give you the money. More money than you could ever possibly need. You can’t sell the house. God, it’s like none of you have ever faked your own death and disappeared before...oh, right, because you  _ haven’t _ .”

“I don’t want to fake my own death. I just want to get out of this fucking town.”

“Tough shit.” Still soft, though Damon’s lip lifts in a sneer. “Stefan knows you’re alive. As long as Stefan is a soulless ripper running around with Klaus, that means you’re in danger. Only way you’re not is if he thinks you’re dead, too.”

Elena steps up to stand shoulder to shoulder with Ric and crosses her arms. For a moment she looks so much like Isobel that Ric’s chest aches. He wonders if Damon is seeing Katherine in the lines of her stubborn pout. Wonders at the combination of magic and genetics that make Elena Gilbert, eighteen and heartbroken, able to stare down a hundred and seventy year old vampire after the year she’s had. 

Before she can speak he reaches out and squeezes her shoulder, and wonders again at the way some of the tension drains out of her at the touch. He opens his mouth, but it’s Jeremy who speaks, leaning into Elena’s other side as he does. “He’s right, ‘lena. You know he’s right.”

“Yeah, well.” She scuffs her foot childishly, just like she had in Ric’s entryway twelve hours ago. “That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

It’s as good as an agreement. Ric squeezes her shoulder one more time before turning back to Damon and rubbing his palms together. “So, how are we going to die?”

\-----

“I need a favor,” Liz Forbes says, voice shaky in a way that can’t be blamed on a bad connection.

Damon takes a beat to consider whether to just hang up on her, or tell her exactly how few fucks he has left to give about what other people  _ want _ and  _ need _ . Between his brother and Elena he’s just about done. But before he can open his mouth Liz is speaking again. “Please, Damon. It’s for Caroline.

Dammit. He actually likes vampire Barbie, though he’ll never admit it, and Elena loves her...Damon sighs dramatically for Liz’s benefit, rubs the furrow between his brows from a headache he’s not even supposed to be able to get, and grits out, “Great. I need a favor too. It’s for Elena.

\-----

“My turn,” Damon says as he wipes the last smudges of Bill Forbes’ blood away with an old fashioned handkerchief. The Forbes’ might just give old Papa Salvatore a run for his money at shitty parenting. At least he never tortured  _ them _ \- a few beatings here and there, but it’s hard to remember what those even felt like, after a hundred and fifty odd years of hardly feeling pain at all - just the girl they thought they loved. 

“Can’t it wait, Damon? I have a traumatized daughter to get home to.” Liz looks tired, and older than her years. For the first time Damon realizes he doesn’t actually know how old she is. Humans are tricky, aging both faster and slower than he thinks they should, and the last time he stuck around long enough to see the lines deepen at the corners of someone’s eyes he was still human himself. Liz isn’t old yet, certainly - hardly looks old enough to have a daughter Caroline’s age - but she’s beginning to wear around the edges.

Damon refuses to think too long about why that unsettles him, and Ric beats him to answering her. “It can’t.”

“It really can’t,” Damon agrees, shaking off his musings. He crosses and uncrosses his arms, taps his foot. Manfully resists the urge to pace like a caged predator. “Ric here is going to take the Gilberts to the cabin for a little getaway before school starts.

“Why?” Liz’s hand goes to her hip - her gun - and the frown lines around her eyes deepen further. “What’s happening?”

Damon can’t help it, he rolls his eyes and sighs theatrically. “I was about to  _ tell you _ what’s happening, before you so rudely interrupted. Put the wooden bullets away, Buffy, no one is dying.” Ric clears his throat pointedly and Damon waves his hand dismissively in response. “No one is  _ really _ dying. Ric’s taking the kids out of town. In about a week you’re going to find his car in the ravine. For anyone in the know it’s going to be very obvious they were attacked and carried off by vampires. Lots of blood, the works. You’ll make sure it gets written up as a drunk driving accident. Tragic. Unsurprising,” he shoots an unkind smile at Ric, who has spent the whole summer propping up the bar at the Grill, very obviously day drinking away his troubles. Something like shame flickers across Ric’s face. “You’ll make sure no one looks too hard for them. That the paperwork is in order, in case any of our old  _ friends _ come sniffing around. That Elena and Jeremy Gilbert are  _ dead _ .”

There’s a long silence in which Liz’s pretty blue eyes are very wide and his breath is far too loud in the quiet room. Damon gives in to the urge to pace - three steps across the room to stand beside Alaric, another three back to hover uncomfortably close to Liz, repeat. Finally, Liz lets out a pained sounding chuckle and scrubs both hands over her face. “That’s a big damn favor, Damon.”

He shrugs. “It’s for Elena.”

“This town is going to kill them,” Ric adds softly. Kindly, somehow, though it’s a tragic statement. Kindness comes easily to Ric despite all of his suffering, in a way that completely escapes Damon, even when he tries desperately. He hasn’t been a kind man since the turn of the Twentieth Century, but dammit, he’s trying here. For Elena. “And they’ll never be safe until they leave it all behind. Permanently. Help me give them that, Liz. Please.”

“Fine.” Her voice shakes, and she clearly isn’t done speaking. Damon turns to leave anyway, because he has what he wants, but Ric catches him by the upper arm. Stills him with a grip that could never hold him, if he didn’t let it. He lets it. “Fine, but I want one last favor too. Take Caroline with you.”

“No,” Damon sneers, at the same time Ric says, “Only if she wants to go.”

“I don’t particularly care what she wants.” Liz draws herself up straight, and her voice is no longer shaking. Her eyes have gone hard. Sheriff Forbes, vampire slayer, grimaces at them and says, “Maybe that makes me a horrible mother, I don’t know. But her father just kidnapped and tortured her. She will never be safe here. Take her with you.”

Alaric sighs and Damon fights the urge to smack him upside the head, because after 170 years Damon recognizes a losing battle when he sees one. He’s fought enough of those recently. “Come up with your own cover story,” is all he says in the end, before breezing out the door.

Behind him it sounds like Ric is hugging Liz, murmuring, “have her at the house in the morning,” with the telltale rustle of breath stirring hair. At least Liz doesn’t start crying until both men are out on the sidewalk and Damon can block it out.

“Disappearing gets harder the more people are doing it, you know,” he grumbles.

“I know. But Caroline deserves to grow up too.”

“Caroline Forbes is never going to grow up. That makes cover stories harder, too.”

“You know what I mean.” Ric jostles their shoulders together and Damon lets it sway him even though he doesn’t have to. “Are you going to help her, or not?”

Damon rolls his eyes and heads for the car without answering. They both already know what he’s going to do. And when did he become the helpful brother? Or re-become him, he supposes, after over a hundred years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the Vampire Diaries fic I never intended to write and now have to finish so my sister doesn't nag me to death. As you can tell, I lifted some of Ric and Elena's lines from episode two for their little heart to heart. Fic & chapter title from Running With Our Eyes Closed by Jason Isbell.


	2. we can never go back and be strangers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ric points them West, running away from the rising sun at seventy miles an hour as the last of the fog burns off while Jeremy dozes in the passenger seat and the girls whisper in the back. He flexes his fingers around the wheel, listens to the new leather creak, and doesn’t glance in the rear view for at least a hundred miles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place over the course of about a week, from Caroline showing up to the last scene. Also, I see you people who have subscribed but not commented. Come talk to me, the only other person I know who watches this terrible lovely show is my sister.

Caroline shows up on the front steps of the Gilbert house at 7am sharp, two pink suitcases at her feet and a plastic drug store bag in one hand. She smiles when Elena opens the door, perfect white teeth and pink lipstick even at this hour, but it’s the smile of a pageant girl. Above it her eyes are distant and haunted and fixed straight ahead to avoid seeing her mother’s car pull away from the curb, though they start to warm when Jeremy ducks past to take her bags to the car and Elena presses a travel mug of coffee into her hands. Syrupy sweet and spiked with Ric’s bourbon, just how she likes it.

“I’m sorry you have to, but I’m glad you’re coming,” Elena confides, squeezing Caroline’s arm. They stand together on the porch and watch as Ric and Jeremy toss the last of the bags into the back of Ric’s old truck. It isn’t much - just enough for a week long trip - and most of it will be abandoned with the truck in a few days. 

“I couldn’t leave you alone with the boys,” Caroline jokes, weak but trying. “Who would do your makeover then?”

“Makeover?” Elena glances distractedly at Caroline as she pulls the front door shut for the final time and locks the house up. It doesn’t feel final yet. Her whole life is still inside of it, just waiting for her to come back. 

“Damon says we need to look different for our new IDs. So, makeover.” Caroline swings the drug store bag meaningfully as they descend the stairs together. “Don’t worry, you’ll look _great_ as a blond.”

\------

There are nightmares and then there are _nightmares_ , and Jeremy Gilbert never had the second kind until last year. Doubts Elena had them either, before the car went off that bridge. Now they come nearly every night, as the ghosts of the dead and the phantom pain of a dozen injuries and the creeping cold that had blanketed him as his own heart stopped beating. He knows what dead bodies look like, now - bloated and bloody and, if they were a vampire, covered in a network of graying veins - and though he never saw Jenna’s body, can’t remember seeing Vicki’s, his imagination conjures up ugly, mutilated versions of them just as easily as it replays his most gruesome memories.

He wakes with a shout, kicking and struggling until he realizes the only thing pinning him down is a tangle of sweat-soaked blankets. By the time he has untangled himself and sat up his breathing is nearly back to normal, though his hands are still shaking and every time he blinks Jenna’s terrified face flickers in and out of view. Some days he wonders if he’s really seeing ghosts. Others, he’s nearly sure the insanity of Mystic Falls has driven him to a psychotic break. He googled it and he’s a little young for schizophrenia, but it’s not unheard of. Especially with the amount of pot he’s smoked.

Either way, there’s no getting back to sleep with two corpses hovering over his bed. He trips on the way to the door in the dark, no longer familiar with his room in the cabin, and stumbles out into the dark hallway cursing. Only when he sees the soft glow of the bathroom light filtering out through its half-open door does he think to check the time. 3am, and the girls had still been up when he went to sleep at midnight. Have nightmares chased them out of bed already, or did they never sleep?

Glancing between the dark staircase and the warm light down the hall, it doesn’t take him long to make his choice. He’ll never admit it - sixteen and still too proud to admit much of anything about his feelings - but he doesn’t much like to be alone anymore. For one thing, the ghosts haunt him less often when he’s with others. For another, fear tightens like a fist around his heart every time Elena is too far away. She’s all he has left, and she’s always right in the middle of any danger that sweeps through town. If her recent behavior is anything to go by she feels the same way about him. They are rarely apart lately, in a way they haven’t been since they were small children.

The scene he finds in the bathroom isn’t so different from one he might have stumbled into a decade ago: Caroline standing behind Elena, who is perched on the closed toilet, combing through her hair. Jeremy remembers Elena and her friends playing at makeovers when they were young, trying on their mothers’ jewelry and heels, twirling their hair up into elaborate hairstyles that were really half made out of tangles and knots, drawing clumsy makeup on their faces long before they learned how to wear it like armor against the judgmental gaze of the world. On a few memorable occasions they had even convinced Jeremy to sit still while they painted his nails. Leaning in the doorway watching them now it feels like something that happened a lifetime ago, though it must have only been a few years.

But on closer observation, this makeover is not like those makeovers at all. It smells like a chemical spill in the little bathroom, and the floor is littered with long dark strands of hair. Caroline is silent and serious rather than giggling, her hair piled on top of her head and turning red under a layer of dye, and Elena is watching with something empty behind her eyes as Caroline works bleach through what remains of her curls. Already she looks a little like someone else, hair lightening in uneven patches and barely long enough to frame her jaw. 

Elena catches Jeremy’s eyes in the mirror and seems to echo his thoughts. “It doesn’t look like me.”

“You’re not supposed to look like you,” he reminds her, in the same breath that Caroline replies, “It’s like you’re finally going through the rebellious phase you never had!” with false cheer.

“I’m pretty sure dating a vampire and offering myself up as a sacrifice to the Original Hybrid counts as a rebellious phase,” Elena grumbles to her reflection.

“So does running away to start a new life with the hot history teacher,” Jeremy says. It draws a muted laugh from both of them, at least until someone clears their throat awkwardly behind him. Jeremy watches the color drain out of his own face before meeting Ric’s eyes in the mirror.

But all Ric does is roll his eyes and cuff Jeremy gently on the shoulder. “Glad to know I’m still the hot history teacher, not just the sad old alcoholic one. Caroline, can I wash this crap out of my hair yet?”

“Oh don’t worry, Mr. Saltzman, you’re still old,” Caroline teases, something like real amusement lighting up her eyes for the first time in too long as she winks at him. Jeremy remembers how much she used to _laugh_ , once upon a time, carefree and joyful (and so annoying). “You’re just hot-old.”

Something about the way Ric’s face twists in horrified amusement highlights the fact that there’s thick black dye in his eyebrows and slicking back his hair, and the whole scene becomes too absurd. Jeremy can’t help it, he bursts out laughing. It’s a half-crazed, sleep deprived kind of laughter that has him doubled over, clinging to the door frame for balance, but at least he’s not alone. Caroline is giggling so hard that she has to abandon her work on Elena’s hair, and Elena hides her face in her hands but is betrayed by the shaking of her shoulders. Even Ric is laughing, leaning into the other side of the door frame for support and leaving black stains behind where he rests his head against the door.

It wasn’t that funny. Nothing in their lives has been that funny for a long time, and maybe that’s why they all spend so long caught up in the rush of manic laughter. Jeremy lets himself slide to the floor as the last chuckles fade away, only to start again when Caroline shrieks in horror and frantically begins pouring bleach onto Elena’s hair once more. “It’s going to be so uneven! I can’t believe I let you two distract me.”

“The dye will cover it up,” Elena points out, too reasonably for a girl who is surrounded by the wreckage of the long dark hair she has been obsessively growing out for as long as Jeremy can remember.

“Maybe,” Caroline mutters, painting bleach onto the last strands as though her life depends on it, pausing only to brandish the brush at Jeremy. “And don’t you laugh at me, Jeremy Gilbert, you’re next!”

That shuts him up.

\------

Dawn has come and gone by the time they all finish and stand shoulder to shoulder in front of the mirror. Jeremy barely recognizes the four people looking back at him - Ric, his hair pitch black and spiky with eyebrows to match; Elena, unnaturally sandy blond curls barely falling below her sharp jawline, his own hair a mess of similarly blond spikes and both of their thick dark eyebrows replaced by bushy, pale lines; Caroline, a stereotypical blond airhead for as long as he can remember looking serious and somehow older as she ties a cascade of red curls up into a bun.

“There’s nothing we can do about those pretty dark eyelashes of yours, I guess,” Caroline sighs, her breath puffing a stray curl out of her face. Grief and disgust flashes there-and-gone in her eyes. “I guess this is really real now, because I’m _definitely_ not going back to senior year looking like this.”

A few months ago Jeremy would have snorted and written her off as shallow. But Caroline-the-girl and Caroline-the-vampire are very different people, in subtle ways, and he’s grown up a lot too. He can see the pain of leaving that she’s barely covering with her distress about appearances. He can even empathize. After all, this is step two to leaving Tyler and her whole life behind, just like he’s leaving Bonnie. Fuck, Bonnie. Telling her is step three, but that’s a problem for after coffee.

“You look pretty,” he says, after a beat too long. Tugs gently on her curls and Elena’s like the annoying little brother he’s meant to be.

“Liar,” Caroline replies, but her laughter follows him down the hall as he trails Ric toward the ground floor. “Don’t drink all of the coffee!”

\-----

“Oh my God, Jer, what did you do to your _hair?_ ” Bonnie’s shriek, turned sharp and tinny by his laptop speakers, echoes through the bottom floor of the cabin. In the kitchen Caroline winces and pours an extra shot of Alaric’s bourbon into her fourth cup of coffee - cravings are a bitch - before passing it back to him. 

“Worst guardian ever,” he mutters under his breath. Elena and Caroline both politely ignore the way his hands are shaking when he tucks the flask into his shirt pocket without pouring any for himself. “I think that’s our cue to leave, don’t you?”

“You two go,” Elena replies as she tops off her mug. These days she drinks nearly as much coffee as the vampires, mixed with enough sugar that she would have put on two pants sizes this summer if she could force herself to eat more than the bare minimum that keeps Ric from nagging her. “I’m going to stay and make sure Jer doesn’t talk himself out of leaving.”

By the time the back door clicks softly shut behind them and Elena tiptoes into the den there are tears falling. Freely on Bonnie’s side of the camera, hurriedly wiped away with the edge of a sleeve on Jeremy’s. _Boys._ Elena steps deliberately on the creaky floorboard behind the couch, though she’s sure Jeremy already knew exactly where she is in the room. He’s hard to sneak up on these days. So is she, for anyone but a vampire. Hypervigilance is a symptom of PTSD - she looked it up - but privately Elena thinks it’s just a symptom of living in Mystic Falls for long enough. Maybe when they leave the town behind they can leave it, too.

Instead of snapping at her to give him some privacy like she expects Jeremy shifts to make room for her on the couch. Elena sits closer than she would have before - before Jeremy died, before she did - close enough that their knees bump and the laptop balanced on his wobbles. Whatever Bonnie was saying cuts off abruptly as Elena leans into the camera frame.

“How could you?” Bonnie whisper-yells, betrayal twisting up her pretty face. For the first time all summer, Elena is glad her friend is hundreds of miles away. One look at that face in person and she’s pretty sure she’d take it all back. Jeremy certainly would, if the tears pooling at the corners of his eyes mean anything.

“How can I not?” Elena replies with a helpless shrug. “You spent most of the last year trying to convince me to live, to not sacrifice myself to Klaus - well that’s what I’m doing. This town has killed Jer and I already. I’m sick of waiting for it to do it again. I’m choosing to live.”

“This town didn’t kill you, Elena, _vampires_ did, and they’re gone. The only thing you’re leaving is _me.”_

“Maybe they’re gone for now, but Stefan came back the night of my birthday and killed Damon’s girlfriend just to make a point. With his humanity off he’s a monster, Bon. And he’s a monster who knows I’m still alive when I shouldn’t be. It’s just a matter of time until Klaus finds out and comes back to finish the job, with who knows how much collateral damage. I can’t let that happen again.”

“I can protect you,” Bonnie protests. “I saved you, I saved Jeremy, I can do it again, I can--”

It’s Jeremy who interrupts her, leaning closer to the screen as though seeing the sincerity in his big dark eyes will make her understand. “Saving her killed our uncle, and whatever you did to bring me back...I think I came back wrong, Bonnie.” He switches to leaning into Elena’s shoulder. In the picture in the corner of his computer screen Elena watches a few stray tears track down his face, his mouth twist, his strange blond eyebrows bunch together. He hardly looks like her brother, but she knows he is still entirely himself. He didn’t come back wrong. Just traumatized. She can work with that.

“Wrong how?” Bonnie asks, an entirely different kind of distress in her eyes. The kind that leads to accidental fires and wind storms on a calm day. “Wrong _how_ , Jeremy?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is getting the hell out of this town before it happens again.” Jeremy scrubs at his eyes with both fists and when he lowers them his face has softened. “And before you get hurt any worse helping us.”

There’s a long moment of silence. A hundred expressions flit across Bonnie’s face - hurt and confusion, grief and fury just a few of the ones Elena recognizes after a lifetime of looking at her - before she speaks again, hoarse and pleading. “At least let me come with you.”

Again, it’s Jeremy who shakes his head. “No. You’ve still got people here who love you. Your dad, a chance at having a life.”

“If I’m not here putting it in danger,” Elena adds. “Without us here you can have a normal life, just like you wanted.”

Bonnie snorts, an awful watery sound. “I’m never going to be normal again. You’re just leaving me to be a freak by myself. Because you’ve decided you know what’s best for everyone else, just like you always do. Screw you both.”

Elena opens her mouth, unsure what’s going to come out and saved from finding out when Bonnie cuts the call. Instead she lets out a heavy sigh that blows stray blond curls out of her eyes and slumps back into the well worn cushions of her dead mother’s favorite couch. Some indeterminate amount of time later she realizes that she’s crying and swipes uselessly at her face. “I’m sorry, Jer.”

“Don’t,” he replies, hoarse from the tears he’s still trying to choke back. “Just don’t. This isn’t something you get to act like a martyr about, okay? We made the choice together. We’ll live with the consequences together.”

“When did you get so grown up?” 

“I dunno, maybe dying does that to you.”

Inappropriate though it is, Elena muffles a giggle into her hands. “God, we’re so fucked.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy agrees, knocking their shoulders together again before standing. “But we’re alive. We can figure out how to be normal later.”

\-----

Elena doesn’t flinch when Damon appears in her window seat later that night, lounging like he’d been there all along. Not even a spike in her heart rate, where once she would have jumped and gasped. Maybe she’s been expecting him - the window was open, after all - or maybe this past year has just desensitized her to deadly creatures appearing in her home uninvited. Maybe she’s just exhausted. Ric had said something about nightmares when Damon wasn’t really listening to him. 

“I like the hair,” he lies, badly. He hates it, those beautiful brown locks turned short and bottle blond. With her eyebrows done it almost looks natural. Yeah, he hates it. “Blondes have more fun, and all that.”

“Yeah, changing my identity in preparation for running away from everyone and everything I know has been _so fun_ , Damon,” she replies with a roll of her eyes. Sweet little Elena Gilbert turned bitter and biting. It cuts through the buzz of whiskey in Damon’s blood, draws him out of the spiral of self pity he’s been falling ever deeper into for the past week, at least a little.

“You’re not running away, you’re getting the hell out of dodge. Subtle difference.”

Elena shrugs before collapsing to sit cross legged on the bed. “Feels like the same thing to me.”

“No, no.” Damon talks with his hands, a bad Italian stereotype he’s never been able to break. Nearly a hundred and seventy years and multiple decades with his humanity switch flipped firmly to off and he still carries that bit of home with him. “Running away is what snot nosed sixteen year olds do when they get into a fight with their old man. Trust me, I’ve done it. You, Elena Gilbert, are choosing to live. You’re just going to do it somewhere that won’t try to kill you every second Wednesday.”

“I guess.” Elena won’t meet his eyes, picking at the frayed ends of the quilt on her bed - a family heirloom she'll never pass on to her own children - until Damon perches on the edge next to her and covers both her small hands with his larger one.

“I could take it all away,” he offers, almost hesitantly. With his free hand he traces the chain of her vervain necklace. Where once she would have shuddered and pulled away, she leans into him. “You could forget this whole horrible year, start over in sunny California as that peppy cheerleader with an annoying little brother who just happens to be living with good old Uncle Ric.”

For a long, horrible moment she considers it. Those big brown eyes flicker with longing for the girl she used to be - a girl who worried about pep rallies and breaking Matt’s heart and getting home by curfew. A girl who knew nothing about vampires and hybrids and doppelgangers. A girl who still had a family. Not so long and also forever ago she told Stefan she wanted to forget but knew she couldn’t. But Stefan is gone, and Damon wonders if that’s changed.

In the end she lifts her head to meet his eyes and shakes it slowly. “No. It’s not safe to forget, to be normal. We can never be normal again. And I…” She turns her hands over in his, squeezing gently. “I don’t want to forget you, Damon.”

Something loosens in Damon’s chest, a hand crushing his heart that he hadn’t noticed until it was gone. Funny, given the fact that his heart has literally nearly been ripped from his chest so many times this past year. He takes his first deep breath in a week, the gesture pointless for a creature who doesn’t need to breathe when he’s not talking, but reassuring all the same. Still, he’s trying to be the good guy here. Trying so damn hard that it almost sounds like he means it when he says, “No compulsion, check. Try to forget me the old fashioned way then. Move on with your life.”

“I just said I didn’t want to forget you!” she snaps, and her stupid bleach blond eyebrows are furrowed somewhere between confusion and annoyance. Without even thinking about it Damon reaches out and smooths his thumb over the wrinkled skin between her brows. She smacks his hand away like a gnat as her voice climbs in volume and pitch. “Stop talking like I’m leaving you behind along with this place. We’ve been through too much together. We’ve _lost_ too much together. I won’t lose you too.”

“I can’t be your stand in for Stefan,” he replies, because Damon has never been able to let sleeping dogs lie. The pillow she throws across the bed is enough of a surprise that it hits him square in the face, but he catches her wrist before the slap that follows it can land. “Stop before you hurt yourself, Elena. Don’t hit me for pointing out the obvious.”

“I’m hitting you because you’re an _idiot,_ Damon Salvatore, and you’re treating me like one too.”

“Now that’s just hurtful.”

“No, stop it, stop acting like this is all a joke, or like you’re some tragic hero, or…” Elena yanks her wrist out of his grips and Damon resigns himself to being slapped. It’s not like it really hurts. 

Instead she grabs his hand again. Their fingers fit together like they were made for each other, Damon thinks, like a romantic sap. 145 years ago he had thought the same thing about Katherine’s hand in his. “Fine,” he bites out, the memory bitter on his tongue. “I’m listening.”

“You can’t replace Stefan,” she says, and that hurts, even though he said it first. “He was my first love. I think part of me will always love him. But the Stefan I love is gone, and even if he comes back somehow, the things he’s done…” She shudders, no doubt thinking of those dead girls in Tennessee. He hasn’t had the heart to tell her that they weren’t even Stefan’s best - worst - work. “And despite all of the terrible things _you’ve_ done, Damon, you’ve been there for me all summer. You’ve _always_ been here when I needed you. You got under my skin and I...I’m not ready to lose that. Or you.”

It’s not exactly a confession of love. It is, in fact, very far from that, but after 145 years of never being anyone’s first choice it’s still better than he expected. If he were the better man he’s been cosplaying as he would let her down gently anyway. Tell her that someday she’ll meet a nice, human boy and start a nice, human family and live out the happily ever after Stefan wanted for her. But chances are she won’t. She’s the doppelganger, her best friend is a vampire, her brother came back from the dead, and their guardian is a vampire hunter (semi-retired). Even if she never sets foot in Mystic Falls again, Elena will never be normal.

So he just smiles with the left side of his mouth and tugs gently on one of the sandy blond curls framing her face and promises, “then you won’t lose me.” It’s not something he can guarantee - they both know that - but he’ll do his damndest. “You’ve got me as long as you want me.” He seals the words with a kiss to her forehead. “Now, shouldn’t you go to bed before you turn into a pumpkin? Big day tomorrow, staging your own death and all.”

Elena glances up at the clock, its hands ticking slowly past midnight, and pulls a face that suddenly makes her look exactly as young as she is. “Stay with me?”

Damon considers her face, the bed, and what Ric might do to him if Damon is still here in the morning. Then he kicks off his shoes, shrugs out of his leather jacket, and slides under the blankets she holds up for him to rest half propped up against the pillows. It’s not like finding him in bed with a girl will be the worst thing Ric has stumbled onto him doing this week, even if that girl is Elena Gilbert.

“Thank you,” she mumbles through a yawn as she curls up with his head on her chest.

“You’re welcome,” he replies, though he feels like he should be thanking her for this one last chance to hold her close. He’s had so few of them.

The nervous flutter of her heart calms as he strokes her hair, and he breathes slowly and deliberately until her breath matches his own and she slips into sleep. Even after she’s out he keeps breathing - humans find stuff like that calming, in his limited experience, and it’s almost soothing, the unnecessary rise and fall of his own chest beneath the spill of her hair. The night air is warm in his lungs even though the temperature hasn’t affected him in 145 years.

The old fashioned clock on the wall ticks hypnotically, lulling him into something that’s not quite sleep as it passes one am. Sometime around two in the morning Elena stirs for the first time, mumbling into his chest. Nothing coherent, but he shushes her softly and resumes stroking her hair - coarser than it should be thanks to cheap drug store dye. The chemical scent of it lingers in his nose when he kisses the top of her head. For the first time since Stefan left with Klaus, he realizes, she doesn’t smell of him. All summer Elena has been the last true connection to his brother, who he has lost so many times before - lost him more than he’s had him, more years of their long lives spent apart than together this past century and change. Damon is careful not to think too hard about the twist of grief-pain-loss that stirs in his chest at the realization that the last link between them has been broken once again.

It steals his words away, and the moment he stops talking Elena starts shifting and clenching her hands in his shirt. When he starts again it’s in Italian, without really meaning to - he speaks it so rarely these days. His accent is outdated, thick with a combination of the Old World and the Old South that he long ago trained out of his English, and the words are half remembered nonsense from his own childhood. The reassurances of a woman who has been dead for a century and a half, the first woman Stefan ever took from him. And how is it still possible to miss his mother, after all this time?

“She would have hated you,” he murmurs into Elena’s hair. “She would have hated this whole modern world, but you in particular, your big mouth and your” he strains for the word, ends up saying “skinny jeans” in English, “and your bravery. You’re not very ladylike, Miss Gilbert. Might be why I like you so much.”

An hour later when she wakes up screaming and nearly breaks his nose with the back of her head she is not ladylike at all.

\-----

“Is my nose crooked?” Damon asks Ric for what must be the twentieth time as he studies his own reflection in the polished surface of the refrigerator. “I feel like my nose is crooked, and it’s your fault for teaching her to punch.”

“Think it’s probably your fault for sneaking into girls’ rooms at night,” Ric mutters into his third cup of coffee. It’s barely four am but the cabin is already buzzing with the nervous energy that comes from too many sleep deprived people dosed up with too much caffeine - Caroline and Jeremy tripping over each other in their rush to pack the last few things that will accompany them into their new life, Elena making stacks of eggs and toast that no one is going to eat, and Ric flipping between his own checklists and the manila envelope full of documents Damon brought without completing processing any of them.

He’s out of it enough that he doesn’t notice Caroline hovering over his shoulder until she lets out an indignant shriek. “Why does he still get to be Ric and I have to be - be - oh my god you named me _Claire,_ what the _fuck_ , Damon?”

“Take it down a notch please, Caroline, I think I’m deaf in that ear now.”

“I’m sorry Ric, but you’re not the one whose new ID says _Claire_. Elena, you should punch him again. Elena, are you even listening to me?” Elena hums noncommittally from the stove, where something is definitely burning. “Come on, punch him again, he named you Charlotte! You’re not a Charlotte!”

“Wait, he did what?” Elena spins, spatula held like a weapon, and Caroline holds the offending ID card under her nose. Ric has already seen it - Charlotte Elaine, 5’7 and blond and 17, along with a second set of ID that calls her Bethany and says she’s 22. He knows he got lucky, with two sets of documents that call him Richard and Jacob - maybe Damon was feeling nice or maybe it’s just that nearly anything is better than his given name. 

“I’m the one who should be complaining,” Jeremy interjects as Elena smacks Damon on the back with her greasy spatula and then puts it back to use stirring breakfast. “Jonathan Gerald Junior. That’s just...ugh. I sound like an old man.”

“I was being nice!” Damon complains, backing toward the door with his hands up. “You can still go by Jer. See, nice!”

Before things can escalate further Ric throws the whole mess of extra ID cards, passports, and brand new phones back into the duffle they came out of and stands. “Doesn’t matter as long as they work, right guys? So how good are these things, Damon?”

“They’re the real thing.”

“They’re literally fakes, Damon,” Caroline chirps in her are-you-stupid voice. (In fairness, Damon often deserves to be subject to that tone.)

“A couple of decades ago, sure. Hell, we used to just kill folks with the right description and use their ID until the body got found.” Damon smirks and waggles his eyebrows when Caroline shudders in disgust. “But my guy has gone high-tech. Compel a few people in the right places, buy the right kind of machinery, and you, Miss Claire Scott, have a passport that will get you across the border and an honest-to-Originals DMV record. Took you three tries to pass the driving test, by the way.”

“Ass,” Caroline mumbles, but the heat has left her voice. In fact she looks stunned and maybe a little grateful as she rubs her thumb across the shiny surface of the driver’s license before pocketing it.

“If you keep insulting me you won’t get your presents Ms. Scott.”

“I don’t want anything from you, Mr. Salvatore,” she huffs, but for once it seems like she’s playing along. The eye roll Ric turns his back on is good natured, at least.

“I don’t know about that. You want my two million dollars, my unlimited credit card and, oh, all these blood bags, don’t you?” Damon hefts a cooler that had been resting by the door and swings it tauntingly. “But I guess I could just throw these out, if you’re feeling ungrateful…”

Black veins flash beneath Caroline’s eyes for a split second before she blurs across the kitchen and snatches the cooler. In the face of Damon’s laughter she extends her hand and wiggles perfectly manicured fingers. “Credit card, too.”

Ric lets the door close on their squabbling and laughter and goes to split the last few bags between his old truck and the stupidly huge, shiny new one Damon arrived with last night. One set of things to burn down along with their old lives and another to start over with. After a moment’s hesitation he pulls a creased photo of Jenna out of his beaten up leather wallet and pockets it, tossing the wallet and the rest of its contents into the footwell of the doomed machine and closing the door with finality. 

Half an hour later the truck that was his home during the first mad months of his search for Isobel’s killer is barely more than a twisted pile of metal a few hundred yards off of the highway, just inside the county line that puts it in Liz Forbes’ jurisdiction. Dawn breaks over the trees as Caroline rips off one more door for good measure and Damon splashes lighter fluid through the broken windows on the side they wrapped around a tree. It’s a very convincing car accident, for a car that no one was driving. 

Ric pulls a pack of matches out of his jacket pocket and offers it to Elena. “Want to do the honors?”

“It’s your car,” she protests, as if Ric should be attached to the idea of destroying it himself.

“It’s your life - or death, I guess. I burned my old life down years ago.” Ric shrugs and pulls out a match, Elena’s small hand catching his before he can strike it. She takes the pack of matches and carefully strikes one, succeeding on the second attempt in the humid morning air, then uses it to set the pack alight. The little rectangle of fire arcs perfectly through the broken windshield and into a puddle of lighter fluid in the front seat.

They all watched, almost hypnotized, as the car full of most of their belongings is consumed by flames, the thick fog Damon summoned sheltering them from any prying eyes on the distant road. Caroline’s pretty pink suitcase melts in the back seat, Elena’s journal chars, and a stack of Jeremy’s half-filled drawing pads turns to ash before their eyes. Ric rubs the creased photo in his pocket between his thumb and forefinger as he watches his own phone and wallet warp and burn. Once it’s burned beyond all hope of a backwoods sheriff’s department gathering any useful evidence off of it, Damon gives the carcass that used to be Ric’s home the last kick it needs to tumble over the edge of the ravine and land with a splash in the creek that runs deep and fast a quarter mile beneath them.

Elena follows it to the edge of the cliff, the flames still reflecting in her dark eyes as she looks over at it. Something about the hollowness in her gaze makes Ric reach for her in the same moment Damon does, each gripping one of her shoulders, restraining without pulling her back. She's so thin that she feels almost brittle beneath Ric’s hand, her shoulder blade pressing sharp into the palm of his hand. He thinks of the untouched stacks of eggs and toast, cooked just to be tossed into the cabin’s garbage bin on their way out the door, and how often he and Elena and Jeremy have moved through those same steps over the summer - breakfast a ritual to be performed without being eaten, two pots of coffee disappearing between them while the food grows cold; lunch forgotten in the frantic afternoons of following clues to find Stefan and then in the rush of preparing to leave; dinners they all wolfed down standing in the kitchen because sitting at the table brought back too many memories of Jenna’s attempts at family dinner. 

He really has been a shit guardian. That’s going to have to change. He squeezes her shoulder and starts to tug her back from the edge once the flames have been entirely swallowed by the creek. “Come on Elena. It’s time to go.”

“One more thing,” she replies hoarsely. He doesn’t have to look to know that she’s crying as she breaks the delicate chain around her neck with a sharp pull and tosses her necklace after the sinking car. “Okay. I’m ready.”

Nobody mentions that she shakes all the way back to the new truck, parked on the side of the deserted highway where it won’t leave tracks in the leaves and mud, even though it’s a pleasant late summer morning quickly warming towards hot as the sun rises overhead. Halfway there Damon takes off his leather jacket and wraps it around her shoulders, and doesn’t take it back when he bundles her into the back seat with a kiss on the crown of her head and a whispered promise, “I’m one phone call away,” followed by a louder admonishment that is still somehow laden with grudging affection, “Take care of her, vampire Barbie. And don’t turn that new phone on until you’re across the Mississippi. No social media, I’m serious!”

When he finally turns to Ric, who is waiting impatiently in the driver’s seat with his door half-open, Damon’s face is serious in a way it rarely is even during his worst moods. Old, tired eyes watch Ric from a face that is eternally twenty-four and gorgeous. “Whatever you do, no detours through Illinois.” He must make a questioning noise, because Damon shakes his head sharply and nods toward the back seat. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Stefan is in Illinois. Ric nods his understanding, more than happy to avoid that mess. “Don’t look back until you’re across the Mississippi.”

“Wasn’t planning on it. Hey, Damon,” Ric hesitates for a moment with his hand on the door. Uses it to grab Damon instead, hauls him into a one-armed hug that would still be bone crushing, if his best friend in the world wasn’t a vampire. After an awkward second Damon hugs him back. “Thank you, brother. For everything.”

“Yeah, well. Just don’t call me complaining when you get sick of being the only grown up around.”

“I am absolutely going to call you complaining about exactly that,” Alaric chuckles. The new truck purrs to life beneath his hands as Damon slams the door and gives the hood an affectionate pat.

Ric points them West, running away from the rising sun at seventy miles an hour as the last of the fog burns off while Jeremy dozes in the passenger seat and the girls whisper in the back. He flexes his fingers around the wheel, listens to the new leather creak, and doesn’t glance in the rear view for at least a hundred miles.


	3. never seen the beauty in the world

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The reality of the situation is beginning to sink in, in a way it couldn’t while they were still in familiar Mystic Falls, or even Virginia. The Mississippi river is behind them, the West stretching out endlessly ahead - a foreign world holding only the fragile promise of a life where everyone around them doesn’t have to die. She has exactly one backpack of ill fitting clothes and a journal to her name and, according to a quick google search on her new phone the moment they crossed the river and Damon’s arbitrary line of safety, Ric’s old car has been found in the ravine, which means Elena Gilbert is well on her way to being declared dead. So she doesn’t even actually have her name anymore either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Alabama Pines by Jason Isbell

Ric heads for Tennessee. According to Damon, Klaus and Stefan have left the state behind, and it’s as good a way as any to escape the Eastern Seaboard. He gives the site of Stefan’s last slaughter a wide berth anyway and is glad Elena doses on Caroline’s shoulder until they’re well past Knoxville, only waking when they pull into a truck stop at a crossroads somewhere well outside of Nashville. It might be the longest she’s slept undisturbed since the sacrifice - like a child lulled to sleep by the roar of the engine and the steady rhythm of the road passing beneath the wheels, Ric thinks, but will never say aloud. 

Staggering wearily from the gas pumps to the restrooms and restaurant, they blend in easily with the other travelers. Ric returns to the car with a bag full of greasy burgers and a trio of maps to find Caroline in the driver’s seat, door closed but windows rolled down, considering him seriously. 

“You’re shaking again,” she says softly. Kindly. It’s true, the ice in Ric’s extra-large iced coffee is rattling noisily against the sides of the cup, but Ric resents her irrationally for pointing it out. He’s irritable and she’s too observant for her own good. He opens his mouth to say so, only to close it with a snap when she lifts the cup from his hand and takes a long drink. The absolutely shameless grin she flashes him over the lid startles him into rough laughter.

“Brat,” he says, taking the drink back and wiping a ring of lipstick away with his thumb. His chest aches with the memory of perpetually cleaning Jenna’s lipstick stains off of mugs and glasses, but it hurts less than it did a month ago. He’s gotten good at grief.

“Get used to it, I hear this is what having younger siblings is like,” she replies. “Not that I would know. Did - do you have any?”

Something passes over her face, maybe for the first time considering that Ric might have people to mourn him too. They don’t know each other very well at all for people fleeing across state lines together. “No, no, only child, and my parents have been gone a long time.” Maybe if they hadn’t been it would have been harder to walk away from it all and waste so long chasing Isobel’s ghost. If she hadn’t been all he had in the world, if he didn’t have a tendency toward obsessive devotion to his loved ones, maybe he would still be on a trajectory toward a career as a respected academic, instead of shepherding a car full of teenagers with fake IDs in their pockets. (Legally, he’s pretty sure it became kidnapping the moment he drove minors across state lines. But legally, they’ve probably been declared dead by now, so it’s really the least of their problems.)

“Oh.” Caroline’s face falls a little more before she forces a smile back on. It almost reaches her eyes. “Well, we’ll have to learn together. Quick, grab shotgun before Elena gets back. She’s useless with a map.”

“Do you think Damon was drunk or just feeling like an ass when he decided on our background?” Ric asks as he slides into the shotgun seat. Cool air from the vents is a sweet relief from the sticky August afternoon outside. He spares a moment to hope they’ll land somewhere where the bugs are smaller and the summers less miserable than the South.

“Drunk, probably.” Caroline eats the burger he hands her with sips from a blood bag to wash it down. Strange that it feels as normal as watching her drink a soda. She shrugs. “I don’t see what’s so mean about making us family. And no offense, but big brother is a lot less creepy than Uncle Ric.”

“The age gap is a little weird,” Jeremy says as he climbs into the bench seat in the back. Ric tosses a burger at him, knows it will be caught without looking. 

“Half siblings,” Caroline reminds him. 

All of them stare at the front door of the truck stop until Elena appears, wearing one of Ric’s old flannels over her leggings and a ball cap pulled down low over her blond hair. None of them comment on their collective sigh of relief when she slides into the car unharmed. Someday, Ric will stop worrying every time she’s out of his sight for more than five minutes. Maybe. But not today.

“Yeah, well, what are you and Elena supposed to be? Twins?” Jeremy laughs at the idea while shoveling fries into his mouth.

“You should really read the background Damon’s guy gave us,” Elena replies, elbowing him before buckling herself in. He flicks her shoulder in return and steals a handful from the box of fries Ric tries to pass her. “Adopted,” she says, pointing at Caroline. “Half-brother,” and Ric fills the hand she waves at him with a burger, “heroically taking custody of his orphaned, troubled younger siblings. It’s all very tragic and romantic,” she giggles, “This guy should be writing novels, not making fake IDs.” 

Jeremy catches Ric’s gaze in the rear view mirror and rolls his eyes. “Right. Whatever. I know Care took three tries to pass the driving test, so don’t kill us, okay?”

“ _ Claire _ took three tries to pass,” Caroline snaps, shooting him a glare when she glances over her shoulder to check for traffic. A moment later she puts the truck in gear and pulls smoothly onto the quiet highway. “I passed on the first try, obviously. I haven’t ever driven anything this big though…”

“Do you think my ring will work if a vampire causes the car crash that kills me?”

“Shut up, Jer.” The soft thwap of Elena’s hand against Jeremy’s shoulder makes Ric chuckle again. If this is what it’s like having younger siblings, maybe the future Caroline is speeding them into won’t be so bad.

\-----

On the outskirts of Nashville, Caroline gets pulled over for going fifteen over the limit. “Wanna bet I can get out of this without even compelling him?” she asks, and nobody takes her up on it. It would have been a losing bet - she blinks her pretty eyes and babbles about how excited she is to be visiting the home of country music and how she’s so sorry, officer, and the cop never even takes her license. He lets her off with a warning and a list of recommendations for less trafficked tourist stops.

When he’s about to walk away, Ric clears his throat pointedly and nudges her shoulder. She purses her lips and glares at him, and he raises his eyebrows and glances from the cop to the back seat and back again. “Fine,” she sighs, and when she looks at the cop again his pupils blow wide and his face goes slack. “Forget you ever saw the people in this truck. Forget what it looks like, forget the license plate. You never pulled anyone over here. You just stopped to pick up some litter causing a road hazard.”

“I just stopped to pick up some litter,” he repeats with no inflection. Even after almost a year it still freaks her out, this power she has to turn normal people into brainwashed shadows of themselves. Human Caroline probably would have thought she’d kill to have that kind of power. Vampire Caroline knows what it feels like to pay for the things she wants in blood - hers, her loved ones’, and strangers’ whose faces she sees burned behind her eyelids at night. The only thing she wants badly enough to kill for anymore is to never have to kill again. (She’d make an exception to rip Klaus’ head off, given the opportunity.)

“I didn’t need to compel him,” she mutters as she merges back into early afternoon traffic. 

“You didn’t need to speed, either,” Ric points out, in his endlessly reasonable teacher voice. It’s her least favorite side of him - she decided this over the summer, as he vacillated unpredictably between friend and co-conspirator in the hunt for Stefan and reluctant Adult Supervision - and she finds herself glad a moment later when he returns to gentle teasing. “Maybe ease up on the lead foot near civilization.”

“If I behave can we stop in Nashville? Just to see the Grand Ole Opry, take a tour and some tourist pictures?”

“No pictures, Care,” Elena reminds her softly.

“I’m not going to post them anywhere!”

“No pictures, and no sightseeing until we’re over the river,” Ric cuts in with a finality that makes her itch to remind him that he isn’t really her guardian. Except he kind of is, according to her mom. Ugh. “Sorry,” he adds a moment later, as if sensing her mood. Not like she’s ever subtle about it.

“Fine. You guys aren’t any fun at all. And we’re going to the first tourist trap I see in Arkansas.” She’s not entirely sure there  _ are  _ tourist traps in Arkansas, but it’s worth a shot. Who knows, they might have the world’s largest ball of twine, or windmill, or  _ something _ , and if it sucks it’ll just serve them right for not letting her stop in Music City.

\-----

Elena watches the sun set over a bend in the Arkansas river from the tailgate of the truck and comes to a startling realization. “I’ve never been this far West.”

“I’ve never been this far from home,” Caroline replies, kicking her feet idly over the edge. Every so often she prods Jeremy with the toe of one of her scuffed Chucks, usually with a complaint that he’s feeding too many of their shared onion rings to the pigeons. Gone is the girl who counted calories so obsessively that she spent most of Sophomore year in therapy for a burgeoning eating disorder. Of course, Caroline doesn’t need calories at all these days, outside of a blood bag. She gets to eat for fun, and to take the edge off of her cravings for something with a beating heart. She will always be thin and gorgeous and seventeen, and for a horrible moment Elena envies her, as she picks at her own sad diner chicken salad and considers the fact that her clothes have become baggy in all of the wrong places. The envy melts away into shared melancholy when Caroline quietly observes, “God, we might never be this close to home again.”

The reality of the situation is beginning to sink in, in a way it couldn’t while they were still in familiar Mystic Falls, or even Virginia. The Mississippi river is a hundred miles behind them, the West stretching out endlessly ahead - a foreign world holding only the fragile promise of a life where everyone around them doesn’t have to die. She has exactly one backpack of ill fitting clothes and a journal to her name and, according to a quick google search on her new phone the moment they crossed the river and Damon’s arbitrary line of safety, Ric’s old car has been found in the ravine, which means Elena Gilbert is well on her way to being declared dead. So she doesn’t even actually have her name anymore either.

“We never even decided where we’re going,” she says, instead of any of that. “Damon said go West, so we went West. But where do we go now?”

“Somewhere big enough to get lost in,” Ric replies. He has a good poker face, but his mouth has been set in a thin line for hours and his fingers are tap-tap-tapping an uneven rhythm on the side of the truck he’s leaning against. Elena hasn’t seen him take a drink in days - not since they got to the cabin, she realizes. The signs of withdrawal have been worse than she hoped but better than she expected after watching him go drink for drink with Damon all summer. “Seattle, LA, hell, maybe Vancouver.”

“Portland seems cool,” Caroline says around a mouthful of onion rings.

“Not Portland. Too many hipsters,” Ric explains with a mock shudder, “and too many vampires.”

“Austin? No, San Francisco? I think I’d like to live by the ocean.”

“Do we have to decide now?” Jeremy asks. It’s the first thing he’s said in hours, aside from his dinner order and a few minor scuffles with Caroline over their snack supply. 

“And do what, stay in Arkansas?” Caroline huffs dismissively and flicks curls that have been turned blood red by the sunset over her shoulder. “Throw darts at a map to decide where to go next?”

“That’s an idea.” Jeremy turns to brace his elbow on the tailgate and look up at the girls - though after his summer growth spurt he’s almost at their eye level, despite the lifted truck. “I dunno, I just…” He runs his free hand through his hair. The mess of blond spikes still looks wrong, but Elena supposes she’ll get used to it, if she looks at it for long enough. She’ll probably even get used to seeing her own strange new reflection eventually. “I literally died a few months ago, and I’d never even been outside of Virginia. I haven’t seen  _ anything _ . So if we’re headed West, but we don’t know where...maybe we could see some stuff along the way while we’re deciding.”

“A reverse bucket list,” Elena says, tilting her head thoughtfully. “All the things to do and see after you’ve already died. I kind of like it.”

“That’s not the worst idea you’ve ever had, little Gilbert,” Caroline agrees. When Elena glances over there’s a light in Caroline’s eyes she hasn’t seen since the planning committee for the last school dance - the slightly manic glint of a control freak whose life is spiraling out of control, suddenly presented with an achievable task. She has to muffle a groan as Caroline continues warming to the idea. “I’ve never been on a real road trip, either. I bet there’s like, a ton of cool stuff to see between here and the coast. We could make a few stops, maybe, right Ric?”

Ric looks at Elena, wide eyed like he expects her to help. It occurs to her, not for the first time, that he really isn’t that much older than them in the grand scheme of things. Not in the way that Stefan or Damon or the Originals are older than them all. The summer has proven that outside of a classroom he’s got no real clue how to be the Adult Supervision, and he knows it - had tried to bail on them for that very reason just over a week ago. But she doesn’t exactly have any advice to give in that department, so she gives the tiniest shrug and watches with amusement as he weighs whether it’s worth arguing with the force of nature that is Caroline with something to plan. She can see the moment he folds.

“Right, I guess.”

Elena hides her giggle behind the last sip of her half melted milkshake. “Hey, Care. Can you put the Grand Canyon on our reverse bucket list? Seems like something we should see before we die again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do y'all think should go on the reverse bucket list?


	4. gimme just one thing of beauty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snapshots from a road trip to rediscover their humanity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from One Thing of Beauty by Marc Cohn

By the time Elena wakes up and rolls over to check the bedside clock the other side of the king-size hotel bed is already empty. Vampires don’t need much sleep, but less than the three hours Elena has gotten so far isn’t enough even for them. And three hours certainly isn’t enough for a human. Elena hauls herself out of bed with a muffled groan anyway and fumbles her way to the bathroom with the help of the soft light leaking under the door to the sitting room of the suite they’ve rented in the nicest hotel in Little Rock. 

Before her stays in the Salvatore boarding house it would have been the nicest bathroom she ever used, big and shiny with a tub she could lounge in forever. Now it’s just a place to wipe the cold sweat of nightmares from her brow while studiously avoiding her own reflection in the huge mirror. 

Ric, for all of his complaints about not being able to take care of anyone, holds out a steaming cup of crappy hotel keurig coffee the moment she opens the bedroom door. “Best fake big brother ever,” she mumbles into the perfectly sweetened drink as she curls up in the corner of the couch opposite him. The blue light of Jeopardy reruns and the screen of a laptop that wasn’t in their possession when she went to sleep are the only things illuminating a table covered in a chaotic spread of maps and notebook paper filled with the pretty, looping handwriting Caroline perfected in middle school. “Where did all this come from?”

“I did some shopping,” Caroline replies.

“In the middle of the night?”

“Advantages of being somewhere with a population larger than ten thousand - 24 hour Walmart! I mean, it’s an evil retail empire, but it’s a great place to blow someone else’s money at one in the morning.” Caroline’s grin is a little manic as she looks up at Elena from the floor in front of the table. A moment later she’s back to typing with one hand and jotting notes with the other, ripping another sheet out of her notebook and putting it on top of a map of...Elena leans forward to find that it’s Wyoming. “Did you know that Arkansas has the only publicly accessible source of natural diamonds in the US? It’s not even that far from here. So obviously we’re starting the Reverse Bucket List there, but after that we’ve got options. So  _ many _ options.”

“She’s been obsessing,” Ric sighs. He rubs at his face, and Elena is glad to see the ugly Gilbert ring still resting heavy on his finger again. When she had given it back yesterday he almost hadn’t taken it.

“She’s obsessive,” Elena replies with a shrug. “Always has been. Vampirism just made it  _ more.” _

“Hey!”

“It’s one of the things I love about you, Care.”

“You’d better,” Caroline grumbles, but she tilts her head into the scratch of Elena’s fingers through her hair and Elena knows she’s forgiven.

“What is Couer d’Alene,” Ric mumbles absently to the TV screen, clearly having given up on understanding Caroline.

“Oh! That’s one of the places on my possible secondary attractions list!” Caroline searches the table briefly before holding up a sheet of paper covered back and front with sight-seeing opportunities, roadside attractions, and scenic routes. 

Elena reads the list with bleary eyes, glancing up once to beat Ric to an answer. “Who is Alexander Hamilton?”

“Oh, so you were paying attention in history classes - just not mine.”

“I had a few other things on my mind last year,” Elena reminds him. “Care, there’s like three dozen places on this list. We can’t possibly go to them all.”

“Of course not!” Caroline plucks the list from Elena’s hands and lays it back on the table before standing. “More coffee?”

“Please,” Elena and Ric say in unison.

Caroline sets the keurig to brewing and leans back against the minibar, arms crossed, watching the humans on the couch. “Anyway, I was thinking we could roll the dice or throw darts or something - North or South, and then narrow it down from there.”

“Dice,” Ric says. “Your aim is supernaturally perfect, Jeremy and Elena have been doing too much target practice, and I…” The hand he holds up trembles less than it did yesterday, but enough to make him miss the map entirely with a dart.

“Dice it is.” Caroline nods decisively and goes back to her self imposed task as soon as the coffee is done brewing. 

With nothing else to do, Elena stretches out on the couch and tucks her cold toes under Ric’s thigh. He looks at her sideways, like he always does when she touches him outside of a hug or handshake - like he’s not entirely sure it’s appropriate, like she’s still his student, like he didn’t spend the summer sleeping on her couch and watching three am Jeopardy reruns with her and Jeremy in their pajamas. Eventually he settles his hand on her sock covered ankle and looks back at the TV and they resume the easy rhythm of trying to answer the clues before the contestants on screen can. She cleans up at the pop culture categories, he beats her easily at history and geography and politics, and they go back and forth over everything else until Jeremy wakes up screaming five episodes later.

\-----

“The news said they identified bodies.” Elena cradles the flip phone Damon had labeled FOR EMERGENCIES and leans back against the truck, careless about the road dust coming off on her clothes. If she doesn’t look at the diner she can pretend that Jeremy, Caroline and Alaric aren’t taking turns watching her out the window, as if someone in suburban Arkansas is going to try to murder her at this ungodly hour of the morning.

“What part of for emergencies only don’t you understand, Ms. Charlotte Scott? You nearly stopped my undead heart.” Damon’s drawl doesn’t sound at all worried, which probably means he did just nearly have the vampire equivalent of a heart attack. Elena would feel worse if he hadn’t just killed three people.

“How did they identify bodies from an accident nobody died in, Damon? You promised you wouldn’t kill anyone!”

“And I didn’t! Jesus, Elena, trust a guy a little. They were already dead. I just stole them from a morgue in Georgia and dumped them in the river.”

That shouldn’t be a relief. Elena feels her shoulders relax anyway, because she has become an immensely fucked up person - which is a problem for later. It’s always a problem for later. “So who identified the bodies?”

“Sheriff Forbes. They were too waterlogged for anyone to argue with her. And now Elena Gilbert has an official death certificate and a grave being dug in the family plot. Funeral’s on Saturday. I’m thinking of making a speech.”

“Damon Salvatore giving a eulogy,” Elena’s exhausted laugh is barely more than a breath. “I’m almost sad I’ll miss it.”

“Don’t be. It’s going to be all about how great your ass was, and what a shame it is the world will never see it again. Well, except on Katherine.”

“God, you’re such a jerk,” she replies, but this time her laugh is louder and more genuine. 

“You love it.”

“If you say so. I’d better go, we’re getting ready to leave - Caroline’s plotted us a roadtrip across the Southwest that might take the rest of our lives. Reverse bucket list - all the things we didn’t see before we died the first time.”

“Let me guess, the itinerary is broken down by the hour? You can tell me all about it next time you call. From a new phone - ditch this one as soon as you hang up.”

“Okay.” Elena hesitates, listening to Damon breathing down the line. It’s barely been 24 hours, less time than she usually went between seeing him in Mystic Falls, but she has to swallow down the urge to say  _ I miss you. _ “Be safe, Damon,” she says instead, a moment before the line goes dead. She tosses the phone in the nearest garbage can as Jeremy crosses the parking lot, spinning the keys around his finger.

“My turn to drive.”

“I know you really  _ did _ take more than one try to pass your driver’s test, Jeremy!” Caroline calls from behind him.

\------

Caroline Forbes wasn’t the kind of girl who liked to get her hands dirty, pre-vampires when chipped nail polish and ragged cuticles were among the things that concerned her (the things that distracted her from the mess that was her parents’ divorce). Claire Scott, she decides while standing in the belly of a volcano that has been dead since millenia before the first vampire walked the earth, doesn’t give a fuck. She sifts cool dark earth through her fingers, watches it collect under her nails and stain the creases of her palms, and pulls shiny gems from the ground while other tourists around her find nothing but rocks.

“You know you could buy something prettier for twenty bucks at a jewelry chain for tweens, right?” Jeremy asks, wiping one of the gems clean on his dirt-streaked shirt and holding it up to the sun. The light refracts through the yellow stone and speckles his face with shadows and light and he looks  _ so young. _

“Or at an actual jeweler, with all that cash Damon stuffed in the trunk,” she agrees, letting pieces of volcanic rock drop from her hands until she finds something else white and shiny. The look on Elena’s face when she unzipped a nondescript duffle to find what must be thirty grand in small bills was priceless. “But these are different. These are memories.” Fractured little pieces of happiness that will be with her long after her human friends are dead and gone.

“Whatever,” Jeremy replies with a shrug, but he goes back to turning over earth with his little shovel, and the next time she glances up he’s smiling.

\-----

Jeremy drives most of the 400 miles south to Houston while Ric comments on geography and history from the passenger seat. It doesn’t feel like history class (and history was always his favorite subject anyway). They try Whataburger, eat three meals a day of greasy junk food, and stop at every roadside attraction and historic plaque that catches Caroline’s keen vampire eyesite, which means it takes them nearly three extra days to make the drive. On the second day Ric buys camping gear and Elena buys marshmallows and they make s'mores around a fire in the National Forest like they haven’t since they were children.

Caroline proves she can fit more marshmallows in her mouth than Jeremy can, and Jeremy laughs so hard that his ribs hurt - though that’s partially because Ric has to give him the heimlich when a marshmallow goes down the wrong pipe. 

“I swear to God, Jer, if you choke to death like a moron I will find a way to resurrect you just to kill you myself,” Elena threatens - while stress eating an entire Hershey’s bar, which means Jeremy marks it down in the win column. Some of the color has returned to her face, and it might be a trick of the firelight but her cheeks look less hollow than they did a week ago.

“I promise not to die again without your permission, ‘Lena,” he teases, sitting down on a log next to her. Over a thousand miles from Mystic Falls it feels like it might even be true.

“Then you’re going to live forever.” She tucks herself under his arm despite the heat of the fire and the warm August night, and Jeremy suspects she’s counting his breaths to remind herself he’s still alive. Sometimes he catches her doing that, on the nights when she wakes up first and comes into his room looking for company in her misery. (Caroline doesn’t breathe when she sleeps, which freaks everyone else the fuck out, though they never mention it to her.)

\-----

On impulse, Caroline ducks into the gift shop of the Houston Space Center just before the tour starts and buys a polaroid camera, old fashioned film and all. “What?” she flips her hair dismissively in the face of Ric’s disapproving eyebrow furrow. “It’s not like I can post them anywhere. We should have something to remember all this by when we’ve settled into our boring normal new lives.”

He sighs and looks at the ceiling as if asking a God they’ve all long given up on for patience, but the tour starts before he can say anything. When Caroline snaps a picture of him in the Starship Gallery half an hour later he looks a decade younger than she’s ever seen him, the lines around his eyes deep from smiling rather than mourning, and the childlike wonder in his gaze turns out surprisingly well on film. “The last Americans to walk on the moon road in this,” he says with awe, leaning up against the railing between Elena and Jeremy. Caroline takes another photo of the three of them in profile with the Apollo 17 behind them. “No magic, no immortality promising they’d survive the experience. Just science and hope.”

“I wonder if a vampire has ever been to space,” Elena says, glancing at Caroline. There’s more life in her eyes than Caroline has seen in months, and she doesn’t have to look to know that the picture she takes of her best friend in that moment will turn out beautiful. 

“Probably not,” Caroline replies, pocketing the polaroid after it develops. “Nothing for us to eat up there but the other astronauts. Seems like a mission hazard.”

\-----

“Isn’t it strange, we know more people who were born before these things were built than there are Missions in this park?” Elena asks in San Antonio, as she marvels at the weather beaten architecture of the ancient holy sites, interrupting Ric in the middle of an explanation of the bloody history of Spanish missionaries in America. 

(“You’ve been watching too much Jeopardy,” she had accused him during their morning stop at the Alamo.

“I do actually have a PhD in American History, you know,” he had replied.

Face flushed with sudden embarrassment, Elena had turned away to study a sign. “I didn’t know that, actually.”

“Yeah.” Ric ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck as if it was him who should be embarrassed. “Didn’t make that part up. This isn’t my area of expertise, but, uh, in case you couldn’t tell I’m a big ol’ nerd.”

“That part I did know.”)

“Want to see something older than anyone we know, Originals included?” 

Elena considers it, tipping her head to the side and squinting at him through the afternoon sunlight lancing through the arches of the Mission San Jose. “Are we gonna fly to Europe to see some castle?”

Her fingers itch for Caroline’s camera when Ric’s face twists like in betrayal someone just stabbed him, though Jeremy is the only other person around. “Christ, Elena, I knew the Mystic Falls history curriculum was bad, but that’s just…” he shakes his head, then claps his hands together in the way that means he’s made a decision. “Right. Next stop, Indian Country.”

\-----

Their next stop ends up being the Mokara Hotel on the River Walk, because Caroline “will go literally crazy if I have to spend one more day in a row in the car with Jeremy’s stinky feet, eating diner food and diner employees for breakfast, lunch and dinner.” So they eat everything but diner food, and blow Damon’s money on 2am room service and trips to the spa.

“Not exactly what I pictured you using it for, but whatever,” the man himself says, his voice crackling through the cheap speakers of their latest set of burner phones. 

“Yeah, well, the massage was worth it,” Ric laughs, trading the phone from one hand to the other so that he can take a sip of his cool beer. One drink only, and the beer isn’t enough to even give him a buzz after a year of drinking whiskey with vampires. A rooftop view of sunset over the river just required something a little more adult than fizzy water. “Just don’t tell Caroline I said that.”

“Did it at least have a happy ending?” Damon purrs. Ric can picture the obscene smirk on his face, the way it would only lift half of his mouth but crinkle the corners of both of his eyes. 

He can’t say he misses Damon - it’s not the kind of thing they say, not over the phone at least - so he settles for affectionately calling Damon a pervert and threatening to hang up on him.

“Hey, wait,” Damon says, stopping Ric halfway to closing the flip phone. “How are the kids?”

_ How is Elena? _ he means, and that’s a loaded question. “Better,” Ric answers after a moment of thought. “Nightmares are still there,” for all of them, “but she’s, uh, she’s laughing again.”

“Good. That’s good. Night, Ric.”

Ric takes the SIM card out of the phone and breaks it in half before dumping both in a trash chute.

\-----

The next stop after that is what Ric promised.

“People lived here for at least ten thousand years before the Originals were even born, let alone stepped foot on this continent,” he says, his breathing still labored. The trail to get to this wall of petroglyphs in the high desert wasn’t easy, but he’s taking too long to bounce back, leaning heavily against an unmarked rock that affords him a view of several dozen feet of rock wall covered in art so ancient Jeremy can barely wrap his head around it

(Ric, who can outrun Jeremy for miles over flat ground, struggles for breath and stumbles over his feet when they reach altitudes higher than this, though he’s good at hiding it. Days later, when their cell service improves, Google tells Jeremy that it’s maybe the drinking making him prone to altitude sickness, though he hasn’t seen Ric have more than a single beer in weeks. He shows the article to Caroline, who hovers closer to Ric after that, as if waiting to feed him vampire blood to fix all of his ills.)

“It’s amazing,” Caroline breathes, turning to take in the whole scene. The polaroid camera that has become her most precious possession has fallen into Jeremy’s hands this time, and he lifts it and snaps a picture as a smile breaks across her face - her first real smile in months. Gone is the pageant girl with a row of perfect white teeth and empty eyes, posing for the world to see. This girl isn’t posing prettily for anyone - her eyes crinkle up, the right side of her mouth lifts further than the left, and as Jeremy watches the film develop he’s glad to see that the joy and awe in her eyes is showing through. 

A moment later it starts raining, a downpour in the middle of the desert, and the shrieks of Caroline and Elena’s childish laughter echo off the rocks and fill the vast empty space. Jeremy takes three hurried pictures and then stuffs them and the camera into his bag to protect them from the rain.

In the hotel that night - a crappy little motel on the roadside in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico, all of them piled into one room with two queen beds and a pull out cot - Jeremy takes the pictures out and looks at them for the first time. Caroline with her mouth open on a laugh as she looks up at the sky just before the real downpour starts. Elena, head thrown back and tongue stuck out to catch the rain. The two of them clutching at each other, clothes soaked, curls plastered to their faces, raindrops caught in their eyelashes - and Ric watching fondly in the background.

“Oh my god, Jeremy, that might be the worst picture anyone’s ever taken of me,” Caroline yelps, trying to grab the trio of photos out of his hand. She’s faster and stronger, but his arms are still longer, and he holds them out of her reach until she overbalances and topples onto the bed hard enough to make him bounce.

“I dunno, Care,” Elena says, studying the pictures from over Jeremy’s other shoulder. “I think it might be the best.”

Privately, Jeremy agrees. He doesn’t entirely remember what joy feels like - even at the Space Center, for all his childhood dreams of being an astronaut, he had felt wonder and awe, but not joy - but he knows what it looks like. It looks like Elena and Caroline clinging to each other in a desert rainstorm, reveling in the feeling of being so young and so small in a world full of big, wonderful, beautiful things that have nothing to do with monsters and death. 

Jeremy wants to feel that way again, too. 

\------

In Arizona, down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with red walls rising a mile high on either side, Jeremy can see the entire Milky Way reflected in Jenna’s eyes. Vicki hasn’t haunted him since they crossed the Virginia state line and Anna is an infrequent flicker in the corner of his eye when his mind wanders, but Jenna still appears to him regularly. Mostly when he’s lonely, which isn’t as often as it used to be. It’s hard to be lonely in a car with Elena and Ric arguing about which of the two rural radio stations is worse, or when Caroline is talking a mile a minute as she drags them from one tourist “must see” to the next, or even around a quiet campfire in the desert these last two weeks. 

But the fire has died and for once Jeremy is the only one left awake. The night air is full of the rush of the Colorado river, the hum of late summer insects, and Ric’s whistling snores over Elena’s soft breaths. Caroline is utterly and disturbingly silent and motionless in sleep. And Jeremy is wide awake and all alone except for a ghost.

“I miss you,” he says to the warm night air, hoping somehow she can hear him.

“I miss you too, kid,” Jenna replies, and Jeremy does a double take that makes his neck hurt.

“You’ve never talked to me before.” Not outside of his nightmares, at least. Maybe she’s a hallucination, maybe he’s been losing his mind in stages since Bonnie brought him back from the dead, but the sound of her voice is a balm for all the broken pieces inside of him that don’t quite fit back together like they should.

“Oh I talk to you all the time.” She looks just as stunned as he is, but beneath that she’s smiling. “You just don’t hear me most of the time. Or see me, I think.”

“What? Why?”

Jenna shrugs helplessly, oversized sweater falling off of her shoulder as it so often did in life. He realizes then that she looks exactly as he last saw her. Same clothes, same messy ponytail, same dark circles under her eyes. Apparently death isn’t very restful. “How am I supposed to know? Y’all are the experts in the supernatural. You made sure I didn’t know anything until the end.”

“I....” Jeremy doesn’t know what to say. It wasn’t his choice, it was Elena and Ric who decided to keep the truth about the things that go bump in the night from her. And from him, for a long time. Hell, he still has holes in his memory where Vicki’s last moments should be. While he’s mostly forgiven Elena for that, Jenna never had the chance. She didn’t have the time. Klaus stole it from her.

“I know everyone thought they were protecting me. I know that.” Jenna sighs hard enough to blow a stray lock of hair out of his face, and she’s leaning close enough to Jeremy that he thinks he should feel her exhale, but he doesn’t. “But there aren’t exactly therapists over here to help me work through how  _ pissed off  _ I was about it.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for my part in it.” When Jeremy tries to cover her hand with his own it passes right through, finding rocky ground where he half expected flesh. His head swims and his gut twists as his mind tries to make sense of the sight of her hand beneath his combined with the reality of what he feels beneath his fingertips until he has to look away. “We were wrong. And it failed in the end anyway. It didn’t protect you. We didn’t protect you.”

“Oh, Jer.” Jenna’s other hand flutters like she wants to reach for him before she twists it in her sweater. “It wasn’t your job to protect me, or anyone. You’re just a kid.”

“I don’t feel like a kid anymore,” Jeremy admits. He looks up at the night sky, full of more stars than he ever could have imagined even stargazing in rural Virginia, and he feels small, but not young. There’s an ache sunk deep in his bones, and a great gaping hole of loss in his chest that he doubts will ever be filled. “I don’t think I even remember what it felt like to be a kid anymore. It’s like everything before my parents died is behind this wall and I can see it, but it feels like it happened to somebody else.”

“That’s called trauma, kiddo. I’m glad you’re not letting it eat you anymore. Any of you. I was worried there for awhile.”

“Yeah, we were...we were kind of a mess.” Jeremy glances over his shoulder at the tent where Elena and Ric and Caroline are sleeping as soundly as they ever do these days. Exhaustion seems to help - they must have hiked a hundred and fifty miles in the past two weeks, on well traveled paths and rugged trails alike, up and down mountains and canyons, all of it on a mission to see a world older than the demons that haunt them. Jeremy can count on one hand the number of times any of them have woken up screaming in those two weeks. That alone makes every bruise and strained muscle and scraped palm worth it. “We still are. But we’re working on it.”

“I’m just happy to see you all smiling again. Now get some sleep, I hear you have to walk out of this canyon tomorrow.”

She’s gone before he can beg her to stay, but maybe it’s better not to say goodbye. He’s got a feeling he’ll be seeing her again. 

\------

Elena watches the sun rise over the Grand Canyon in a wash of gold and orange that would take her breath away, if she wasn’t already gasping for it after their hike out of its depths in the dark. Ric is sprawled on the dusty red earth on one side of her, Jeremy on the other, while Caroline lounges easily on a bench ten feet further up the trail. If Elena had the energy she would resent Caroline’s ability to climb mountains and canyons as effortlessly as she walks down a paved street. But that wouldn’t be fair - Caroline can do those things because Elena dragged her into a life of vampires, and somehow Elena is the one who stayed a plain old human while her friend’s life was turned upside down.

They have the viewpoint mostly to themselves, only the most ambitious other tourists having dragged themselves out of bed for the sunrise, and Elena basks in the warmth and the color for a long while. When the sun is far above the horizon and the heat of the day has begun to beat down on them Ric hauls himself up to sit next to her with a groan of effort, squinting out over the Canyon.

“It makes me feel so small,” Elena says softly. “But in a good way, you know?” Ric grunts in acknowledgment, his sweaty shoulder pressed against hers. At some point in the last six months his solid presence at her side has begun to feel like home and safety. “I’ve spent this whole year feeling young, and stupid, and powerless, and afraid, and  _ small _ next to all of these terrifying ancient vampires and their plots. I was a pawn, not a person. Even to Stefan and Damon - they love me because they loved Katherine, and it became more than that, but it wasn’t at the start. It was all just because I was the doppelganger.”

Jeremy’s hand finds hers in the dirt, lacing their fingers together and squeezing. She drops her head onto Ric’s shoulder and squeezes back. “I’m starting to feel like a person again. My own person, not the doppelganger or a shadow of Katherine or a human sacrifice. Just me. Elena Gilbert. Or Charlotte Scott, I guess.”

“It’s nice to finally meet you, Charlotte Scott,” Ric chuckles. Sometimes she forgets that he never knew her before she was the center of Mystic Falls’ supernatural insanity. He feels like family, even after such a short amount of time. 

“It’s nice to meet you too, Richard Scott,” she teases, elbowing him gently before turning serious again. “I - we - never could have done it without you. Thank you, for getting us out.”

“I think you could have,” he replies. “But I’m glad I get to help.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In order, the places they visit are: Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas (where you can in fact dig up your own diamonds!), the Houston Space Center, the Alamon, San Antonio Missions National Historic Park, the San Antonio River Walk, a handful of National Parks in New Mexico and Arizona to see petroglyphs and archaeological sites (there are too many cool ones, I couldn't decide), and obvs the Grand Canyon.
> 
> Next stop - finding a new home.


End file.
